Sen. Jeff Sessions: Obama created border crisis

The president’s policies have failed to enforce the law and are hurting American citizens.

The crisis on our border is the direct and predictable result of President Obama’s sustained effort to undermine America’s immigration laws. As the president’s previous director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), John Sandweg recently acknowledged: “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.” Enforcement has collapsed.

Today President Obama says he needs $3.7 billion from Congress to handle the crisis his lawless policies are creating. Amazingly, the funding request further advertises his administration’s amnesty efforts and our fraud-riddled asylum programs, while explicitly omitting any request for expedited deportation authority. The request is also not paid for. The administration wants to borrow every penny.

President Obama has yielded to the demands of open borders groups, to whom he pledged amnesty in 2008. He has dramatically abandoned his lawful duty to the American people. Immigration enforcement for the world’s most powerful nation is now held hostage by a small band of radical immigration activists. That is why the administration still refuses to deliver the crucial message necessary to halt this flow: If you attempt to cross our border illegally, you will be apprehended and deported.

Most egregiously, the president has announced his intention to yet again bypass Congress in order to expand his far-reaching non-enforcement directives. His unlawful actions guarantee that the $3.7 billion will be only the beginning, and that the deluge of illegal immigration — and the huge costs — will only grow.

And growing with it will be the crisis for the American worker. This flood of illegality adds to an already massive flow of low-wage labor into the U.S. Between 2000 and 2013 the federal government issued 26 million visas to foreign workers and new permanent immigrants — corresponding with falling wages, soaring joblessness and rising poverty in our struggling communities.

When did we forget that a nation owes its first allegiance to her own citizens?

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., is the ranking member of the Budget Committee and a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He wrote this column for USA Today.